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Jan 02

Swirly curls in Adobe Illustrator

2007 at 07.55 pm posted by Veerle Pieters

Let me start by wishing you all a very happy new year! May 2007 be a year full of inspiration and creativity! Today I’ve picked another topic from my list of requests that readers of my blog send in: swirly curls. Lets add some trendy elegance to your illustrations! Here we go…

Step 1 - Draw a spiral

Go to the Toolbox and hold down the mouse on the Line Tool so the other tools are revealed. Select the Spiral Tool. Now click and drag a line from the center point outwards. Instead of click dragging you can just click to get the Spiral Options box and enter the spiral radius, decay and spiral segments and click OK. I've used 80% of decay and 10 segments. If you click drag the spiral, remember that you can move the spiral while dragging if you hold down the spacebar. Give the spiral a stroke and no filling. Copy the spiral and paste it in front: go to the Edit menu and choose Paste in Front or hit command/control + f. Now select the Rotate Tool and click the center point of the spiral and drag the spiral to the right to rotate it a bit.

Step 2 - Transform the spiral into a nice curl

Select the Selection Tool (black arrow) or hold down the command/control key so you get the transform handles. Scale the spiral as shown in the image so you add thickness to the spiral from the center point out and you'll get a nice curl in the end. Select the center points of the 2 spirals. Use the Direct Selection Tool and drag a rectangle over the anchor points, make sure no other points of the spirals are selected. Go to Object > Path > Join (or hit command/control + j) to join both paths. Now do the same for the 2 ending points of the spirals.

Step 3 - Add a fill and put the curl in place

Click the double arrows right above the colors in the Toolbox to swap the stroke to a fill. Change the fill to your preferred color. Now drag the curl in place. Rotate the curl if needed so it forms a fluent line with the object you attach it too. You can select both and choose the Add to shape option in the Pathfinder palette if needed so they become 1 object.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Maybe this can be done in another way by using a special brush instead of copying the path, transform it and join the points, not sure. I haven't experimented with that. I just get perfect curls when I use this technique.

Want to learn more?

A good and not expensive source to learn more about Illustrator, Photoshop, or web design is by joining the Tuts+ sites. You get access to the source files for just $9 a month. So your ONE membership gives you access to members-only content for ALL the Plus sites. I've written a tutorial for the Vector Tuts section.

related

Another learning resource

Layers Magazine, for everything you need to know about the Adobe® CS4 apps.

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Duluoz Tue Jan 2, 2007 at 09.11 pm

This is a very nice tutorial Veerle. I find that by also implementing the “Transform Each” with the “copy” command then crtl+D you can make some very nice vine-like drawings very quickly that look nice and appear random as nature intended. :)

Thanks Veerle. I was also wondering how you had attached those curls to the vines - now I know! They do look random in your drawing and like they just emerged from the vine. I like the way the whole thing sort of takes over the landscape.

I saw some similar looking vines on a Christmas shopping bag for this department store here - only theirs had other things on it like pine cones and berries and leaves with swirls. Wish I had a picture of it I could show you, but I guess I’d have to scan the shopping bag to do that. :) Will have to try this and see if I can create something like it.

This is a great technique and a really easy to follow tutorial. I’ve also found that in Step 2 a good way of ensuring that scaling doesn’t overlap at points is to select the spiral to scale, use the Scale Tool and set the reference point to the centre of the spiral (as you did when rotating before). Dragging the end point of the spiral diagonally should scale it proportionally. This gives you a nice sharp point at the centre - of course, it depends on what type of visual effect you’re going for.

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A. J. Wed Jan 3, 2007 at 02.42 pm

In order to get the tapered look, I create a custom brush that is pretty much just a wedge. Then I apply it to the line and play around with the stroke width to get the right taper. Then you can “expand appearance” of the line to make it a shape.

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tom-erik Thu Jan 4, 2007 at 12.00 am

I just love it, been looking for this ;) Happy new year !

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Tommy Paul DuCharme Thu Jan 4, 2007 at 01.01 am

I stumbled across your site today and it is very nice! I’m just an amateur digital image guy sitting in the desert using Adobe Production Studio to work pictures and make some DVDs for my son’s high school athletic teams.
You’ve got great creativity and a gift for presenting the ideas in a way we can all understand.
C’mon to Arizona and I’ll buy you a beer!

Maybe this can be done in another way by using a special brush instead of copying the path, transform it and join the points, not sure.

Yes, it can.

I have a library of three art brushes that I keep in my Illustrator startup documents: a triangle, an oval, and a half-an-oval. Each of these is about 1pt by 10pt so the line weight works the way I expect it to. I used to make them each time I needed them but I got tired of doing it over and over again.

Rather than going through all this duplicating and point welding, I can just grab the triangle or half-oval and draw a spiral. Probably with the pencil tool and my Wacom tablet.

I use these three brushes for a lot of things; I don’t use each of them in every piece, but I usually find myself reaching for one of them at some point in every illustration I do.

Janet Fri Jan 5, 2007 at 07.42 pm

I scanned these images of the shopping bag so you could see this other example of a vine. I think yours is actually much more original-looking, but when I saw it, it reminded me of this Nordstrom’s shopping bag I had. I’m still working on trying to draw something more extensive, but the curly swirls part of the tutorial was very nice and easy to follow.

Awesome! Thanks Veerle.
I was trying to do this earlier in the year but failed because I was changing the second swirl node by node. Rotating and scaling is the key!
I don’t have AI yet so I was trying to interpret you instructions into Inkscape. It was actually very easy for this one. Perhaps now I can go back and try the ribbon one, now that I know how to join the paths properly (in Inkscape they whole paths need combining first and then the end nodes can be joined).
Keep up the good work - helping us with less advanced skills :)